Navigating Complexity: The Role of Abstraction in System Modeling

Episode 137

I spoke with Davidad Dalrymple about:

* His perspectives on AI risk

* ARIA (the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency) and its Safeguarded AI Programme

Enjoy—and let me know what you think!

Davidad is a Programme Director at ARIA. He was most recently a Research Fellow in technical AI safety at Oxford. He co-invented the top-40 cryptocurrency Filecoin, led an international neuroscience collaboration, and was a senior software engineer at Twitter and multiple startups.

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Outline:

* (00:00) Intro

* (00:36) Calibration and optimism about breakthroughs

* (03:35) Calibration and AGI timelines, effects of AGI on humanity

* (07:10) Davidad’s thoughts on the Orthogonality Thesis

* (10:30) Understanding how our current direction relates to AGI and breakthroughs

* (13:33) What Davidad thinks is needed for AGI

* (17:00) Extracting knowledge

* (19:01) Cyber-physical systems and modeling frameworks

* (20:00) Continuities between Davidad’s earlier work and ARIA

* (22:56) Path dependence in technology, race dynamics

* (26:40) More on Davidad’s perspective on what might go wrong with AGI

* (28:57) Vulnerable world, interconnectedness of computers and control

* (34:52) Formal verification and world modeling, Open Agency Architecture

* (35:25) The Semantic Sufficiency Hypothesis

* (39:31) Challenges for modeling

* (43:44) The Deontic Sufficiency Hypothesis and mathematical formalization

* (49:25) Oversimplification and quantitative knowledge

* (53:42) Collective deliberation in expressing values for AI

* (55:56) ARIA’s Safeguarded AI Programme

* (59:40) Anthropic’s ASL levels

* (1:03:12) Guaranteed Safe AI —

* (1:03:38) AI risk and (in)accurate world models

* (1:09:59) Levels of safety specifications for world models and verifiers — steps to achieve high safety

* (1:12:00) Davidad’s portfolio research approach and funding at ARIA

* (1:15:46) Earlier concerns about ARIA — Davidad’s perspective

* (1:19:26) Where to find more information on ARIA and the Safeguarded AI Programme

* (1:20:44) Outro

Links:

* Davidad’s Twitter

* ARIA homepage

* Safeguarded AI Programme

* Papers

* Guaranteed Safe AI

* Davidad’s Open Agency Architecture for Safe Transformative AI

* Dioptics: a Common Generalization of Open Games and Gradient-Based Learners (2019)

* Asynchronous Logic Automata (2008)